


come run your hands through my hair

by secretsarenotforfree



Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: F/M, Hair TM the fic, Hopeful endings, Introspective (I Guess), Plot What Plot, if anyone disses the mullet or the bob in the comments you can catch these hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:46:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28178595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretsarenotforfree/pseuds/secretsarenotforfree
Summary: More than absolutely anything, though, it’s cute.It’s fucking adorable and he wants very, very much to ruin every picture perfect line until she’s a mess under his hands and mouth instead.
Relationships: Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	come run your hands through my hair

**Author's Note:**

> this is the shortest thing i've written in literal fucking ages. like i'm so proud at myself for exerting RESTRAINT. dedicated to the beckett to my castle, eleanor.
> 
> title from 'my hair' by ariana grande but idk it's loosely related i just like song titles

The bob is severe.

It’s neat, and statement, and not a single strand of it is out of place when he first sees it. Rigorous and as much of a projection of her than the rest of her. _Detective Beckett._ A woman not to be messed with in a man’s world. 

Takes some time, to get used to it. To equate it with the tiny flame he saw fiercely handled at the back of those hazel eyes, the short lines and structured strands. The picture struggles to fit in his mind with this idea of her in his head in the parts of her locked so far and away, but it slips perfectly in place in the little things. The perfect curve of a too long bang, the pomegranate rhythm of her when she flips it out of place.

More than absolutely anything, though, it’s cute. 

It’s fucking adorable and he wants very, _very_ much to ruin every picture perfect line until she’s a mess under his hands and mouth instead.

* * *

  
  
  


So he’d thought that the bob was peak cuteness power for her.

For a women who took such pride in being a ball buster and who’s smudging black liner was as strategically planned as her high high heels and her straight straight pant legs, he can’t say it doesn’t ruin the image a little bit, with that hairstyle. Soothing, sweet featherings brushing her neck like anyone with blood in their veins wanted to do. A devastating frame of that wide, spectacular smile.

He wheedles Alexis into watching the original _X-Men_ trilogy movies for her Social Sciences paper on prejudice and can’t help himself from snapping a picture of the screen. He only sends it a couple of hours later, when Alexis falls asleep midway through the third and she’s drooling on the couch cushions. Blanket tucked around her and kiss on her forehead, he settles back into his seat and sends a picture of Famke Janssen to a contact marked only as _Heat_.

_I didn’t know you had telepathy powers_ . _She doesn’t pull it off nearly as well as you do, though._

She tells him to go fuck himself but he knows her well enough by now that it’s not genuine and a fully masquereaded tease right back. Then she says that he better not be imagining himself as Cyclops because he has absolutely nothing on James Marsden.

Which, of course he isn’t.

He’s Wolverine, secretly broody and all passion first and thinking later, and wanting so, so far out of his league and constantly existing out of his depth.

Not short, though.

At least not short.

* * *

  
  
  
  


She kicks him out of the precinct for a month.

A solid thirty two days, if he’s being specific and precise, things he tends to do only when it comes to the plot of his novels and when he’s writing _her._ He’s had the date of the photoshoot marked in his mobile calendar since he’d realized that maybe he’d fucked up bigger than he’d thought a week after he told her what he’d found and she went freezing cold.

Thirty two days, and of all the directions her hair could have taken he’s surprised to see this one.

Business in the front, party in the back, indeed. Not that he’s getting any of the back, because she’s still A Lot Mad and it’s business old and he misses that smile that he slaved over to receive. That first, free grin framed by bullet proof glass and sheened blue protective eyewear that shone like she did even when she was doing her damnedest to not stand out. It looks soft and a little fluffy and he wonders a lot if he’ll ever be close enough again to fully examine it’s swoops and flips.

The thick bang does its best, but he’s glad that it can’t quite conceal the warming of forgiveness in eyes that suddenly dart down, and he can’t help his smile.

* * *

  
  
  
  


He’s glad, dumbly, selfishly, that Demming doesn’t get the mullet, because it means that those memories can’t be tarnished.

That he can crowd that sweet, impossible smell of her and cherries close to him, of soft glances in tight thick blue and dancing earrings, of that one burger place where her purple eyeshadow made her glow even in the dingy shine of 2 AM diner lights, and tuck them somewhere safe without the stench of the robbery officer all over him. Maybe someone should set him on the case of how did he think it was fucking fair that he could steal memories of a sex shop and two, separate, beautiful examples of clear jealousy with one, gut kicking image of hands on hips. Of someone else’s made cup of coffee in her too elegant hands, of her laugh caused by someone out of their foursome.

They didn’t need a five, and Castle develops a sudden and very bitter distaste for odd numbers.

He knows there’s somethin off, something he’s missing, when he turns his back on it, but he’s resolved that if she can ignore everything he knows is lurking in his eyes in those moments that stretch to wonderful and long between them, that he can ignore this too.

For his sake, at least.

If not hers.

  
  


* * *

Four months, and it’s long.

That’s how time works, and hair works, but Castle’s still surprised. It’s curious, to see it spill over her shoulders when she looks down at her case files and it’s closer to the shade of the interrogation rooms than he’s seen in ages. He likes it, though. He likes it even more when she starts curling it, gentle and romantic and he becomes more obsessed with the idea of how it might feel between his fingers than ever before.

He finds himself with Gina, gazing at the butter yellow and wishing it was more burnished and bronzed. More inviting of the drag of a finger to break the slippery curl of every long spiral. He should hate Josh for it, for all the things he was allowed to do and that _he_ wasn’t, but it all flies out the window in a not empty enough parking lot and urgency so strong it ran through them both.

He no longer has to wonder about how silky it would be when he would run his hands through it, how it was the perfect cushion for him to cup her head to his, the graze of her too long bang across his cheek conjuring sparks like skidding metal.

It haunts him, like the rest of that day, for weeks afterwards. For months.

A lot of things about her do, especially at the end of that year.

(He wishes that one thing didn’t.

All that gleaming rusted copper, as sharp as the red his hands left behind, shaking terribly as words torrent from his lips and he convinced himself that as long as he could touch her, she wouldn’t go anywhere.)

  
  
  


* * *

She doesn’t cut it, afterwards.

He doesn’t know if it’s his place to wonder, that if it would pull that scar burning her sternum through whatever armor she puts on, to trim it. It deepens and hangs straight and then a kinky, messy curly that dangles, tempting, just out of reach. Just like the rest of her.

He wonders if she knows about all the things about this time that he’s going to remember, when she, in the past, hadn’t at all.

It’s better than wondering about what she doesn’t.

* * *

  
  
  


(Her wet hair may be his new favorite thing.

Thick, unkempt, heavy when he strokes it behind her ears with her on top of him and goes in for a kiss. A damp, grounding presence pressed by his hand on the back of her neck while his hips work and their lungs work and legs and yet this isn’t work at all. It’s heavy, and exhausting with all the weight that led them here, but it’s not hard. And he thinks he’d go through it all, every moment over again, for this one.

It would be a next level of karmic bird flipping, but if he goes like this, with her hair freshly soaking from his shower and her form cuddled bare into his own, he’d be pretty damn happy.)

  
  
  
  


* * *

It’s all honey brown and golden, when he’s finally allowed free reign to it.

Catching on the writing callouses of the tips of his fingers, sprawled on his pillow, showing up in all sorts of unexplainable cases on his suit jackets and twirled in his hands. He watches with too much inexplicable joy seeing it grow, a front row seat to the length that he parts gently on her naked back and wheedles her into letting him brush, sometimes, just to hear the little noises it brings from her.

The word _angel_ comes to mind more often that not with all the deep flaxen halo and a lightness he’d only ever guessed was hiding behind the woman he’d been following for the much greater part of five years. She tucks it behind her ears before standing on her tiptoes to kiss him and gathers it in messy buns that fortuitously leaves her skin bare for him to brush his lips on. 

It brings a sort of banked _ire_ in him, that Puffed Shirt British Accent is almost close enough to her to even brush that long spill of caramel, and he does his very best to assert his hard earned privileges after the massages, after he kisses her long and deeply enough that the wrinkle between her brows finally fades out.

It betrays him, hiding her face and her DC secret, in her apartment.

  
  
  


* * *

He forgives it, a day later, when it means _Yes, I want forever with you_ instead.

* * *

  
  
  


Oak colors and long, thinner strands mean distance. Means separation and watching her pull it into sharp buns and braids over Facetime at what feels like the crack of dawn just to get as much of a glimpse of her as he could. He misses it, sharply, even if it doesn’t hold a candle to the inferno of _missing_ he holds for all of her. 

It only gets back it’s love when Beckett’s hands are wildly unfilled for only the second time in her life and he hasn’t had to wish for endless nights with her at his side because he happily has them again. She tells him that he needs to get the dead ends cut off, but she’s waiting until she’s settled on a hairstyle for the wedding. Something about better to have the length than not.

He doesn’t care. As long as she’s happy, he is? So it’s all good.

As long as he can spoon her and bury his face in it and smell that familiar, entrancing conditioner, he’s happy.

  
  
  


* * *

(His face is tomato red, nearly, when it’s shorter again. Longer that Demming, shorter than his second time across rather than beside her at the table. It’s shoulder length perfect, a little fresh they’ve gotten together warm and a touch pre-funeral warming up to him. It’s beautiful, just like everything she’s ever tried, and her engagement ring still winks at him when she runs her fingers through it at her temple like the model she once and briefly was.)

* * *

  
  
  


Massaging shampoo into her scalp and laving conditioner on each strand, it feels, to get out the hairspray is a pleasure. Nipping at her ear and having her cringe a little, laughing enough to shake shoulders nestled against his chest and make water slosh a bit in his ridiculously large tub at the Hamptons, is a gift. When she grabs his hand mid hair wash to press a kiss to the silver she’d slipped, forever, on his hand only hours ago, quiet and so tender in his big empty house his ribs ache, he wonders what look she’ll be sporting later.

What color will he lose his hands in, for the rest of his life?

What length will she choose for the years when the little Thems are so chaotic and everything that self comes utterly second and things get lost more than they are found?

Will it curl or straighten when they grow older, darken or lighten as years gather on their matching rings?

He doesn’t know.

He doesn’t have a clue.

But that’s okay - he’s never had every solution when it came to her.


End file.
